


Before You Go To Bed, Make Sure To Leave Your Door Open For Me

by lesbonaruto



Category: Gintama
Genre: Dadtoki, Gen, Mentions of PTSD, NOT ROMANTIC I STG THEYRE FAMILY, Night Terrors, No pairing - Freeform, Yorozuya Family, kagura as the baby sister and shinpachi as the big brother and gintoki as the dad, please protect my baby girl kagura, shinpachi is amazing and sweet and we love him, we stan a dependent father & daughter duo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 09:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20486405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbonaruto/pseuds/lesbonaruto
Summary: On the nights where he wakes up shuddering, sweat dripping down his neck and the memory of a sword at his throat, he seeks her out.





	Before You Go To Bed, Make Sure To Leave Your Door Open For Me

**Author's Note:**

> just a cute idea i had about kagura and gintoki snuggling

On the nights where he wakes up shuddering, sweat dripping down his neck and the memory of a sword at his throat, he seeks her out. She’s asleep in her normal cocoon inside the closet, wrapped up in blankets and a dog by her side. Sometimes he’ll stay outside the closet door and just listen; listen to her breathe, knowing that she is alive and well and _ peaceful _. He’ll listen to the dog snoring too, hearing his little grunts and barks in the night. They both snore, the girl and the dog, filling the living room with a cacophony of noise. But he doesn’t mind, in fact, he counts on it. He counts on it to lull him back to sleep. 

Some nights he’ll just open the closet door and scoop her from her cocoon, lifting her up onto the couch. She’ll groan a bit and say his name in annoyance, but he’s never really sure if she wakes up. They’ll stay together on the couch like that, cuddled up, facing their night terrors together. He’ll stroke her hair and mutter stories of the past to ears that can’t hear. Or maybe she does hear, maybe she hears all his stories and just pretends to sleep out of respect for his privacy. Either way, he holds her close and tells her all he knows. 

_________

On the nights where she wakes up crying, memories of endless rain and abandonment on her mind, she seeks him out. She snuggles under his covers and whispers tales of a beautiful mother, a lost father, and an even more lost brother. At this point they must know everything about each other, even subconsciously. Sometimes she’ll bring Sadaharu with her and they’ll come together in a dog-pile. Sometimes it’ll just be her and him and the sounds of the Kabuki district. She likes to turn the radio back on and stare up at the ceiling, counting every crack and crevice in it. She thinks she knows the ceiling like the back of her hand now. There are times when she imagines Shinpachi there with them, all three holding each other’s hands, grounding themselves in the present. There are times when she imagines that all of Kabuki is there, holding her hand, telling her not to slip away into the past. 

There are times when even he can’t keep the terrors away. She’ll grip his side and shake with tears, caught up in the rain. Then he will hold her close, so close, and stroke her hair, and hum something terribly off-key. And then she can go to sleep in peace. 

She sometimes finds it embarrassing that a fourteen year old girl needs the help of a grown man to go to sleep. She’s a teenager now, she should be able to do these things herself. But the man that she calls Father is far away, and the one she thinks of as her father is by her side still. She rationalizes that this was making up for all that time spent alone on her sad, sad planet. The universe owes her, and now it’s delivering. Just not quite in the way she expected. When she was younger she missed her father being by her side. Now there’s one that never leaves. She wished for a brother who valued her, who was kind and would stick around. Now she had a brother that was so full to the brim with kindness there wasn’t much room for anything else. She even had a dog, like she always wanted. Her family turned out alright, in the end, just not in the way she was expecting. 

She doesn’t call him “father” and he doesn’t call her “daughter” but that’s what they are to each other, and no amount of semantics can change that. She turns in her sleep and he cradles her closer, and together they can fend off the night terrors. 

**Author's Note:**

> DNI gin//kagu shippers y'all freaky


End file.
